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Gender Pay Statement

Nugent Gender pay statement

Background

Nugent is a large charity based in Merseyside, offering a diverse range of care, education and support to adults and children through our special schools, care homes, community and social work services and social enterprise. We work at the heart of some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. We strive to generate interest, awareness and understanding of issues around poverty and social welfare and the impact of this on our wider communities.

We employ 583 permanent staff, plus 184 Relief workers and 196 Volunteers. The majority of these work in our adult residential care homes, children’s homes and schools. We support our operational services with management support departments based at our Central Office in Liverpool.

Income for our services is derived mainly from Local Authority contracts.

Pay Analysis

In common with the rest of the care sector, we have experienced rising costs attributable to statutory wage increases, general inflation, temporary staffing, and the need to reflect market rates of pay to retain skilled individuals. The effect of these additional costs has been magnified by decreases in fee income, leaving little scope to address terms and conditions of employment.

As a consequence, approximately 37% of our staff are paid at less than £1ph above the National Living Wage. These roles are Support Workers, Teaching Assistants and Hotel Services staff, all of which have been performed traditionally by women. In our case, 86% of these roles are performed by female staff. Childcare Workers, Specialist Support Workers and Supervisor/Team Leader roles are paid at higher rates, but male staff are still outnumbered in these roles by female staff by a factor of 2:1.

Overall, the Nugent workforce is 28% male and 72% female.

The above factors have the effect of creating a gender gap between male and female staff. This means that the average pay of all our male staff is 10.3% higher than the average pay of all our female staff. If the salaries paid to all our male staff are listed from highest to lowest, the salary halfway down the list (known as the median) is 13.6% higher than the median salary for female staff. This compares with the national gender pay gap(1) of 17.4% average and 18.4% median for 2017.

(1)Source: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Office for National Statistics – 2017

Other Pay Information

We have analysed our list of highest-to-lowest salaries by dividing the list into four equal parts (known as Quartiles), and looking at the proportion of male and female staff in each Quartile. This shows that working up from the lowest to the highest Quartile, male staff make up an increasing percentage of staff in each Quartile.

At middle management level (Department/Registered Manager and above), 63% of positions are held by female staff. As at 1st April 2017, 4 out of 6 Executive level posts were held by women, including the CEO.

Our Governing Body, which includes the Trustees, comprises 7 men and 4 women.

We have defined pay scales for each of our roles, which means that male and female staff receive the same pay for doing the same job. The table below shows the recipients of the top 20 and top 50 salaries by gender.

Also shown is the CEO’s salary expressed as a multiple of Nugent’s male and female average salaries, and of Nugent’s lowest salary. For example, the CEO earns 3.43 times the average male salary. By comparison, CEOs of FTSE 100 companies receive on average 120 times the pay of the average full time worker (2).

Highest salaries paid to:

Males

Females

Top 20 highest salaries*

10

14

Top 50 highest salaries*

36

60

Salary multiples

Male average

Female average

CEO to average

3.43

3.82

CEO to lowest

5.45

* more than one person may receive the same salary, so the totals do not equate to 20 and 50

(2) High Pay Centre website – January 2018

Addressing the Pay Gap

The main issue which we face in addressing the gender pay gap is the tendency for our lowest paid jobs to be performed mainly by female staff. We will consider how we can develop our recruitment campaigns to make careers in social care and education more attractive to male applicants.

There are more females than males in management roles, and therefore there are opportunities for female managers to act as role models or mentors to more junior female staff who wish to progress their careers. We will continue to ensure that our supervision and appraisal processes identify both male and female staff with career aspirations and provide support for them to develop their skills and knowledge. We provide Supervisory skills training and a Leadership Development Programme which currently has 5 female and 3 male participants. We will ensure that these development programmes are equally accessible to male and female staff.

Our existing flexible working procedures include part-time work, flexible hours contracts and, for management staff, the opportunity to work from home and to work flexibly between Monday and Saturday. We offer KIT days for staff on maternity leave to make sure they feel a continuing part of the Nugent “family”, and offer them a range of options for returning to work. We will review these procedures to ensure that they are achieving their aim of making it easier for staff to combine work and family responsibilities.

Finally, future increases in the National Living Wage will need to be absorbed into our pay structure, and this may have the effect of raising average and median pay levels for female staff.

Summary

The proportion of female staff in management roles is significantly higher than for male staff, and therefore the gender pay gap is a consequence of our lowest paid roles being predominantly performed by females. One element of Nugent’s mission is to become an employer of choice. Part of our work to achieve this is to do whatever we can to address the gender pay gap that has been identified. This will include reviewing our candidate attraction strategy, and ensuring that any barriers to career development are identified and addressed. In doing this, we will be complying with our organisational values which are summarised in the acronym iACCORD ; Integrity, Ambition, Courage, Compassion, Optimism, Respect and Dignity.